On 4 April 1986, in the
Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, no more than
fifty miles north of Kiev, reactor Number Four of a large nuclear plant
exploded in the vicinity of Chernobyl. Its radioactive waste was detected in
parts of Europe as remote as France, or Lapland, where entire populations of
reindeer feeding on contaminated tundra had to be destroyed. Hundreds of
deaths and thousands of cases of fallout-related disease struck the Ukrainian,
Bielorussian, and Slovak populations. For the first time in recorded history, an
exodus of nearly a quarter of a million "environmental refugees" proved that
environmental politics could no longer be considered a marginal geopolitical
issue.

The progressive flow of uncensored data (eased by glasnost) revealed that
Chernobyl was only the tip of the iceberg. For decision-makers, in the Soviet
bloc or in the West, even those least concerned by ecology, the risks of
geographic, economic, and political instability became too obvious to ignore
as it coincided with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Another revelation was
that an environmentalist opposition existed behind the iron curtain. Could it
have played a role in destabilizing the regimes?

But Central and Eastern European ecology also became a fad.
Sensationalism, then overexposure, then daily routine, devaluated the issue.
Whatever was left of our vigilance in the early 1990s was further blunted by
the illusion that reforms, democratization, foreign aid, and a free market were
to solve all problems. Today, the Central and Eastern Europeans themselves
seem to have lost any interest in environmental politics.

Yet, a small but influential chorus of Western analysts is determined to
make an issue out of the environmental problems of the "Other Europe." Their
main concern is legitimate: how could one expect five decades of catastrophic
mistakes in environmental management to have been corrected in less than ten

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